'Smashed' review: A recovery, and a revelation

(SONY PICTURES CLASSICS)One step at a time: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, left, and Octavia Spencer are AA members in "Smashed"

Have a drink, you're feeling happy. Have a drink, you're feeling sad. You're going out - have a drink. You're stuck home alone - have a drink. You need to get your courage up - better drink something. You need to relax a bit - better drink something.

Ugh, hungover again? Lord. OK. Here. Drink this.

This has been the boozy chorus of Kate's life since, oh, high school sometime. But now she's 20-something. And beginning to wonder, well, what if I didn't drink? Not that I have a problem or anything. Oh, no. No. But what if, you know, I didn't?

And that's when her life begins to change.

"Smashed" is Kate's movie and it follows the usual trajectory of movies about addicts of any kind - at first the characters are funny and then they're kind of awful. They hit bottom, go into treatment, do well for awhile, then get stressed and flunk out.

And then start all over again.

"Smashed" pretty much follows that same line. But it does something else that rehab movies have done since "The Lost Weekend," too - give a charming, amusing actor (because drunks can be charming and amusing, at first) a chance to do full-out drama (because eventually, in these stories, that's going to come along, too.)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is the latest to take on the challenge, and in its own small way, "Smashed" does for her what "The Lost Weekend" did for Ray Milland, "Days of Wine and Roses" did for Lee Remick and "Clean and Sober" did for Michael Keaton - it makes you give a performer a serious second look.

Winstead has an alert charm and curious eyes and, 30 years ago, might have been one of that decade's glorious gang of Smart Brunettes - Karen Allen, Debra Winger, Brooke Adams. Instead, our era gives her jobs like playing the heroine in the latest bad-idea remake of "The Thing," or Mary Todd in "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter."

But "Smashed" gives her more to work with than another crummy horror movie. It starts, actually, by giving her a signature, no-nonsense look - lots of loose flowing skirts, flat sandals, a kind of working-class hippie aesthetic. And then, like all these rehab movies, it lets her be funny, then annoying, then almost tragic.

And then, finally, funny again - but tougher, and stronger.

The script is by director James Ponsoldt and writer Susan Burke, and Burke has said that some of it is drawn from her own life. And I'm guessing those parts are the ones that ring the most true, like bicycling-while-drunk nights around Los Angeles neighborhoods. Or the sudden, and often disastrous, need for a bathroom.

Other parts though - like Kate's teaching career - feel less rooted in reality. And although her annoyance with her equally drunken husband, played by Aaron Paul of "Breaking Bad," feels real, her own story has huge gaps, with far too much of it happening offscreen - and too much of it simply hitting all the expected notes of the recovery drama.

But another hallmark is giving an unexpected talent a chance to step up. And, happily, that's here as well.